Dartmouth Strategic Planning :: Power of the Imagination

Power of the Imagination

Don Pease, professor of English and the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities

At the Dartmouth graduation in 1925, half of the class shouted the slogan, “Oh the places you’ll go!” To which the other half replied, “Oh, the people you’ll meet!” One member of that class, a young Theodore Geisel, never forgot those words. Later, as Dr. Seuss, he incorporated them into one of the most beloved children’s books of all time. “I am forever indebted to Dr. Seuss for teaching every student who comes to my class to learn to love to read,” says Don Pease, Professor of English and Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, who recently completed a biography of the famous children’s author. “He appealed to the dimension in every child who wanted to hear from an adult voice say that, ‘You will move mountains.’ When you hear that voice, you hear a voice appealing to what is best in you—and what is best in you is imagination.” 

That capacity for imagination is at the heart of the traditional liberal arts education, says Pease, and is more relevant than ever in the age of the Internet, when our reality has become ever more fractured. “The students of the future are going to have access to so many disparate sources of information,” he says. “If you don’t have the imaginative capacity to organize and synthesize this disconnected heap, you won’t be able to organize it in a way that can persuade others of the significance of your vision.”  

That’s precisely what Pease did back in the 1980s as part a group of scholars who reinterpreted the canon of the “American Renaissance”—Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman—for a new era. “In World War II, it was organized to serve Cold-War interests,” he says, citing an emphasis on ideas such as freedom and democracy over some of the canon’s more radical impulses. “Embedded in their texts were figures who could also foster an understanding of what it meant to live in a multicultural democracy.” More recently, Pease has used literary criticism to critique recent American foreign policy in his book, The New American Exceptionalism, and to provide an explanation for the popularity of current President Barack Obama. 

For the latter, says Pease, Obama has learned not just from his idol, Abraham Lincoln, but from Lincoln’s own teachers—Thoreau and Emerson. “What those two great teachers understood is that it’s impossible to identify with either side when you are trying to produce a progressive vision,” he says. “Obama speaks from inside the rift in order to call for ways to bridging it. That’s a wonderfully strategic position to occupy.” Using examples like this, Pease argues the humanities are far from a dusty relic, but rather crucial to understanding modern politics and culture. 

“American literature is the place in which you learn from the great connoisseurs of fantasy America’s deepest dreams of itself,” he says. “Politicians have always borrowed tropes, images, and metaphors from the American canon for their political platforms.” Beyond using literary studies to understand current politics, says Pease, a good leader can use literary rhetoric to sway others to his or her vision. Just look at former Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson ’68, an English major at Dartmouth, who “found a way to use the gifts of narrative and argument to undertake what is perhaps the most remarkable financial transformation in the last 100 years.”  

Whatever their fields, says Pease, students can use that same literary understanding to move their own mountains.